


The World The Girl Saw

by sentimentalblue



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan, aot, snk - Fandom
Genre: #aot, #attack on titan - Freeform, #eremika, Canon Compliant, EREN AND MIKASA - Freeform, Eremika - Freeform, F/M, I wrote this way too late, So yeah, ahhhh, em - Freeform, eren/mikasa - Freeform, it takes place after ch 137, snk, take it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:21:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29774724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sentimentalblue/pseuds/sentimentalblue
Summary: Hi, a while back someone on Tumblr asked me if I could write something about how I think Eren and Mikasa's next meeting will go, and this is what I wrote. This can take place after ch 137, right after the rumbling stops and they are searching for Eren.
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman/Eren Yeager
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	The World The Girl Saw

For the world the girl saw was always embedded in so much cruelty that she blinded herself from it and chose to see the beauty it so scarcely offered. 

It was beauty, the thing she got lost inside of every time she dared look at him. It was his loud confidence, his hastened bravery, the waning crescent of the reassuring smile he wore when it all seemed to go to waste. 

When did the beauty in those green-gray eyes of the boy who saved her become cruel and mocking towards her? 

When did his frown deepen into the depths of blinding anger? When did his screams become filled with a despair and anguish that scared away any traces of laughter. When was it that his bright eyes became empty shells that looked straight towards a path he refused to take himself out of? 

She can’t lie to herself anymore and she sees the truth as clear as day. No more is she seeing him through the rose colored tinted glasses she found refuge in. 

_ Blood. _ The ruddiest of reds were now splattered over her eyes screaming to her that she was wrong. She was wrong and so was he. 

Both fools, who foolishly doomed themselves towards something sinister they unknowingly relinquished their control over to. 

Still… she wants to be right about how she believed in him. She holds hope inside her. The hope that no matter how bitter and harsh the cold can be; warmth will inevitably take over and thaw away the snow to reveal a quiet bed of spring flowers. 

Even now as the world lays to waste, she yearns to see him once more. 

Screams, tears, the smoke of the giants that walked with the sole purpose to destroy, now remain unmoving. The chase to save the world is now over, all that’s left is to retrieve the one who chose violence over and over again. 

_ Eren.  _

Mikasa shivers as the eerie silence the world has enveloped her in, becomes heavy with what is now lost. She wants to run away and never look back to what has just transpired, yet she remains. She waits and she holds her feelings at her throat knowing that this isn’t the time to cry. 

_ Not yet, _ she thinks. 

“Eren…” Mikasa mutters to the rising smoke that slowly disperses around them. 

For a fleeting second she foolishly believes she can find him and take him home, just how she has always wanted to. Yet, a foolish second it will remain, because there is no undoing what he’s done. 

There’s no way he can atone for the pain he’s inflicted upon the world. 

_ What has he done?  _ She repeats for the hundredth time since this ordeal has begun. 

It’s too late to wonder what could have happened if she had answered differently. If only she had chosen another path. If only he had led her towards that path… maybe things would be different, and not the dregs of an impossible dream. 

She misses the boy he once was, but she realizes that who she misses is a ghost that can only haunt her mind. A ghost who will never return to stand before her, no matter how much she begs and follows the phantom that now inhabits his body. 

He was always screaming at the world, so angry, so hurt, holding on to a pain that was not his, but for one reason or another, anger became him. He said goodbye in the cruelest way, slowly and present before her, until he was no longer there. 

She doesn’t want to blame herself, she doesn’t want to stay up all night asking herself where it was that she lost him… or maybe she never really had him to begin with. There was always a pull coming from his end, and no matter how hard she held on, he always slipped out of her grasp. 

**_“He’s right here!”_ **

Her chest thumps, not knowing who it is that shouts declaring that they found him. She runs. She runs to the voice, she runs towards the idea that she’ll see him again. She runs. She always runs. 

She runs until she is met with the wasted body of the person who held her stars and moon. Looking at him is harder than thinking about him, because what is it that he has become? 

She cries. She cries and falls to her knees as she realizes he’s holding on to his last breath. He’s ready to let go, she knows it, but she needs him to know about all the unspoken words she helplessly clung on to. She needs him to realize that no matter how far he strayed, she was going to bring him back once more. 

“Eren…” she whimpers. 

She feels him shift and he slowly opens his eyes to look up at her. He doesn’t speak, not a word is uttered. 

Will this really be their last goodbye? 

She wants to hold on to him, but there’s not much to hold in the state he’s in. 

“Eren,” she says again, closing her eyes and scrunching her face as the tears continue to fall. 

“M-Mikasa…” he breathes. 

She looks at him and he looks at her, pain filling the eyes that she once thought could hold the sun. 

She realizes that her and Eren were always meant to say goodbye. A forever couldn’t be an always for them because their destiny never meant for that to happen. Nevertheless, for one reason or another they were always meant to be a part of each other’s life. 

He opens his mouth to speak, but he’s too weak, the toll from having turned into a huge monster carving the result onto his weary body. 

She kneels before him, resisting the urge to fall and cry out to him for all the pain he made her feel. What can she tell him really? It’s so loud inside her head with all the words she wants to say, but what can she say when there is nothing to do anymore. 

_ Cruel world _ , she thinks. What a cruel world she was born into, a world where she fought with blood and tears for his well being, for it to just dissipate into smoke and ashes. 

She shakes her head, telling herself that it wasn’t only him she fought for. She thinks of all the lives they just finished saving and has saved before, and she thinks of the many other people she shares beautiful memories with. 

Her blinks and tears fall, and her smile grows as she tenderly caresses his face, “Eren…” she softly whispers. 

She does this, ignoring the way their friends fill the background with words of “What’s happening?” and “Mikasa! Eren!” being screamed at them in anguish.

She pays them no attention and allows herself to be taken wherever it is Eren wants to take her. And before she knows it, she’s not on the outside world anymore. 

_ Sand. Lots of sand. Paths.  _

A world of mystery, a world of remembrance, a world that’s etched in her DNA and that connects everything and everyone at one passing path. She could question how they got here, but she doesn’t, instead she smiles as Eren sits before her with his body fully formed. 

Sand slips in between her fingertips as she pats the sand below her. She’s too tired to ask what is happening, and so she just lets herself be there in the moment with him. 

Nevertheless, she breathes a tiny gasp as she looks down at the sand below her as it slowly turns into a bed of flowers. Purple, blue-violet petals shimmer underneath the warm tendrils of sun rays, blanketing them in a familiarity that’s always existed between them. 

Even though she stood in the grip of foreign soil a few moments ago, the breeze that caresses her skin is the same one that kissed her hair in the softest of ways when she was a young girl staring down at the sleeping form of a young Eren. 

She’s been here before, of course she has. The place she called home, the boy who became just that. They were here together before. 

She has visited this moment in her dreams ever since the day it happened. She doesn’t realize how or when this happens, but they are under the tree. The tree she once roused him from. 

Her heart aches too much for her to try to understand what’s happening, nevertheless, she’s happy that this is where they find themselves. Since she always wanted to show Eren a room of flowers after the bloodthirsty war he’s refused to return from, she’s happy to be here with him. 

“Eren…” her soft voice breaks through the murmur of the rustling grass listening quietly to what they are about to say. 

There’s not much time, she can feel this in the air, she can see it in his eyes. 

_ Time.  _ That’s all she wanted to have with him. Nevertheless, that seems to be coming to an end, as she can picture every grain of sand inside an hourglass making its way through the narrow opening, letting her know that it’s running away, and that no matter how fast she runs, she won’t catch up. It’s all coming to an end. 

“M-Mikasa,” he rasps like the broken pieces of glass that’s now impossible to piece back together. 

The top of his eyelids are revealed as a tiny smile paints his face as his attention is captured by the red material she limply clutches in the folds of her hand. 

_ The scarf.  _

All she feels is the material slipping from her grasp as her heart flutters, jumps, skips, stops,  _ ceases to exist _ , all at the same time. 

She follows his movement with her tear filled eyes as he moves to get the fabric that tied them together since the first time they met. 

His eyes glisten with his own tears, which slowly build at the base of his lid, dipping every lash in a pool of his heartache. 

He remembers and so does she. A promise that was thought to be left forgotten in the heaping ashes of a repressed ember that was never kindled into fire. 

He holds the scarf like it could easily break, like the shattered promise he failed to keep from the first time he told her he’d wrap it over and over again all those years ago. 

When the softness of his knuckle hovers over the scarred tissue of her cheek, do the echoes of a wound made ages ago come to life. Skin on skin, the ghost of a battered dream turning into reality before the girl whose world was a hellish nightmare became blanketed by the charm of a incandscendent boy. 

“I’ll wrap you up in it,” he says as he extends the fabric and settles it around her neck, “Over and over again… forever.” 

She feels the heat of his breath against her face as his fingertips slowly move to trace the scarf around the nape of her neck. 

They both shed tears as he wraps the red material around her once, then twice, until she can feel the snug warmth from his action. 

“I don’t have much time,” he says. 

She purses her lips to stop her wail from escaping her because she can’t believe what it’s all come to. He’s leaving her once more, and this time she can’t follow. 

All she wanted was for him to come back home, but the damage is done. 

“Sorry.” 

“E-Eren…” she manages to say. 

She tells him the only thing she’s been able to tell him, “Thank you… thank you, for wrapping this scarf around me.” 

He smiles at her and it hurts her to see his smile. 

It hurts him too. She was always there for her and he can’t understand why it was him who hurt her the most, when she loved him the most. Yet, he smiles and cries and he wonders how he couldn’t understand her love before. 

_ “I love you.”  _

They don’t know who says it first, but the words hang in the air for a lingering moment, and a gust of wind blows the three syllables away from them, to be carried to the leaves and the surrounding nature around them. 

A kiss. 

Lip on lip, moving gently against one another. So gentle, so chaste, so filled with longing and everything that can be yearned inside the touch of two beings who held on until they couldn’t anymore. 

For an evanescent moment in between the kiss… a lifetime of what could’ve been flickers in their minds. Not memories of the past or present, but memories of a normal life and what could’ve been between them, settling in the back of their minds like wraiths haunting their choices and paths. 

She holds on to him, and he holds on to her. Palms on each cheek grasping in an accepted desperation that they must let go. 

Tight,  _ tight _ … so tight they hold on, until she’s the only one with a grip on his frame. 

_ He looks so at peace _ , she ponders, as she carefully moves him to settle against the tree’s trunk and she settles a shaky hand atop her scarf. She smiles at him with a single tear drop running down her scar. 

“See you later, Eren,” Mikasa quietly whispers to him. 

And so, haunted memories will soon become cherished remnants of the boy Eren once was. He’s already gone. She realizes this as she runs a smooth hand over his face. 

A mixture of thanks and regret for what could have been. 

They both lived the lives they chose to live, and the cruelty became one with the beauty in hopes that with time it could co-exist. 

Even in the end loving one another was not a losing game, because she won. A razor sharp knife cutting that tattered string loose, and  _ she’s free.  _

Because what is freedom to a person who readily shackled themselves to the rusted chains of liberty only to throw the key away. The toil within Eren’s mind refused to see that freedom could readily be held within the palm of a girl’s hand. 

Nevertheless, the girl will live with pride and with a happiness that will be uprooted from the hope that as long as humanity will live on, so will she…  _ so will he _ . She smiles until the tears stop falling. And as long as she lives, the memory of him will never die and live on in the corner of her heart that will forever hold a place for him. 

_ Nonetheless, there’s a twinkle of hope lighting the expanse of the town they once called home. Where once a wall met the end of the grassy flowering field, it now meets the expanse of the sunset, setting them free so they can perhaps start  _ **_once more._ **

The End. 


End file.
